OCEANOGRAPHY: Cunningham / Atlas

4.11.2012

originally published in

Ocean (2010)

directed by Charles Atlas/ choreography by Merce Cunningham

THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART | APRIL 11 – 15

“Could you make a dance in the round?” John Cage asked Merce Cunningham
before the James Joyce/John Cage Festival in Zurich, in June 1991. Cage
had in mind a dance performed in the middle of a circular space,
surrounded by the audience and then musicians, in concentric circles.
There being no suitable venue at the Swiss event, Cage’s idea was set
aside, and a little more than a year later, he died, quite unexpectedly.

Photo credit: Cameron Wittig. Courtesy of Walker Art Center.

Cunningham, as ever persevering, finally realized their grand scheme
in Brussels on May 18, 1994, at the vertiginous theater-in-the-round
called the Cirque Royal. There, for the first time, 112 orchestra
musicians played a complicated 2,403-page score, “Ocean 1-95,” by Andrew
Culver, elaborating on Cage’s initial plans; at the same time, David
Tudor introduced his live electronic soundscape, “Soundings: Ocean
Diary,” comprised of eerily reprocessed underwater noise. Marsha
Skinner’s sea-inspired leotards and filmy dresses painted the dancers in
purples, turquoises, oranges, mauves, violets — the colors of the sun,
the sky, the untroubled sea. The dance itself was an amazement: 90
teeming minutes of movement, perfectly without front, back, or sides.

The dance has since been revived thrice, most recently for a fantastic
run in a setting for the Rainbow Granite Quarry in Minnesota, in 2008.
There, Charles Atlas, Cunningham’s long time collaborator in filmmaking,
captured the dance. Although you can’t see him in the film, the
choreographer is there — just off the circle of the stage, near
the ramp by which the second dancer in the piece enters, bundled in a
winter coat and hat and scarf against the damp and bitter night air.

At the time of that revival, in July 2008, I asked Merce Cunningham about the process of making “Ocean,”
in one of 19 interviews for the web series “Mondays with Merce.” Here
are excerpts, never before published, from that discussion.

NancyDalva:Ocean took its title from Joyce, in a sense.

MerceCunningham: Yes. I’ve
forgotten when, but Joseph Campbell, the mythologist who was a friend of
ours [Cunningham and John Cage], was talking once about Joyce, that he
thought the next work Joyce would have done would have been about water—Ocean.
That’s how it began. And John Cage began putting ideas about it with
[the composer] Andrew Culver’s help into the computer. This would be a
large work. We had both decided it could be 90 minutes, and we both
liked the idea of not...no intermission, because I thought, well, that’s
the length of movies and people don’t expect an intermission. So we
could begin to think that way. And then there were, again from Joyce, I
think it’s Ulysses that has 17 parts. Finnegan—the Wake—has 18. So we assumed that this could
be 19. So in my choreographic scheme, I decided there would be 19
sections. That had nothing to do with the length of any given section,
except the whole thing would be 90 minutes.

Dalva: How did you determine the length of the individual sections?

Cunningham: A great deal of it came up by chance. For Ocean
I first thought to make 64 phrases, but I didn’t think that would be
enough, so I made 128. Some of them are very short, some of them are
long continuous phrases. Then the order I did again by using chance. So
that often the length of the section was determined by how the phrasing
came out. If it were a long phrase, it might take three minutes.

Working on Ocean was an absolutely extraordinary adventure. I
came here [to the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio at Westbeth] on a
Sunday. We were going to begin rehearsal that week. So I came and marked
out—here by myself in this large studio—I marked out a circle. Then I
thought, well, since I’m not in the circle yet, I—trying this out—would
have to start off stage.

What was off stage? So I figured out—well, I’m practical, I put it at
the back, and that was an entrance. Then I started the phrase that came
into the circle—into the performing area—and stopped—

What’s front? It’s all front. So then I thought, well, if I use chance
to determine—having come in—which way you face, how many space changes
do you make…? So again, to aid in all this—or I thought it
would—I divided this circle into a maximum of 12 possible spaces. Then
again by chance I determined whether a phrase would stay in a given
space or whether it would move from one to another. And in the course of
all that, how many times did it turn, so to speak, front. Front was
wherever you face.

Okay, well that you can see took a while, and it took me quite a while
to figure out a way to translate this to the dancers because the whole
thing was an adventure. But it was so fascinating to me the way
something that I had always seen from one angle, now I was seeing it
from three or four different angles.

Dalva: After the premiere in Brussels—just after the opening night party—you said to me, “Now all my dances look flat to me.”

Cunningham: Yes. With a proscenium space your focus is mainly front. Even though you can turn this way and that way [gestures with his hands], ordinarily, you see it mainly this way. Maybe this way. Maybe this way. How often do you see it from the back?

Dalva: It’s like trying to get through a canvas on a painting to see the other side.

Cunningham: Yep. But also the chance operation, using
it that way made one shift constantly. For instance, the dancers were
in one space facing this way. Then the next phrase having gone through
the chance operation, you find three of them are going to be over there
and one of them is going to be there. But when they get there, which way
do they face? So that the thing was not always a reference constantly
to one direction, but to this multiplicity of directions.

Dalva: There’s no bad seat in the house for Ocean.

Cunningham: Nobody has ever complained to me that they had a bad seat.

In his editing of the film he captured at the quarry, Charles Atlas has captured not an experience of seeing Ocean
a single time, from a single seat, but the experience of seeing it many
times, from various points of view; a notion of the work in its
entirety. This was a last collaboration, because just as Cage died
before the dance could be made, Cunningham died before the film was
complete. Like Merce before him, Charles Atlas completed the work begun
in tandem: a marvelous, monumental, and infinitely telling ending to
their marvelous partnership.